Bought this today on Blu and I was very impressed. I loved both the design and animation. I know that puts me in the minority here, but then again, I was never a big fan of the Timm/Dini Batman show. It was on when I was a teenager in highschool and there were some great episodes and moments, but on balance I had too many problems with the writing, characters and the fact that the overall "Timmverse" only looked good when the animation was at it's best. Otherwise it tended to look cheap to my eyes. What made it worse was that because Timm's designs were so simple for animation (meaning less money needed for production) this style became a HUGE influence on a ton of action adventure cartoons from the mid 90's until just very recently. I am not a gigantic anime fan per se, but I really liked the influences in design and action here, and that Timm's aesthetics are being replaced by a more detailed and robust look , Young Justice being a prime example.
I never read the book but I enjoyed seeing a Flash centric story and the alternate universe had great ideas all around. Other than it also co starring Batman (you know, that little known underexposed character DC owns) and having the usual unnecessary Bat contrivances (really? The GL ring couldn't deactivate Zoom's tech? Zoom's tech from the 25th century.... How much older and more advanced are the rings? You do the math. But we can't have the Batman just standing around when he could be making some DC hero seem illogically useless. SIGH) I thought the dialogue was sharp and the overall plot well served. Now if only WB would let these things actually be 90min. in length. It would help to flesh out story and characters. My one real complaint is it seems like they now want to push Nu52 into animation and I am sorry, but THOSE are some damned ugly designs.
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